Members of the crowd cheer when a man, wearing a blue suit and a long red striped tie, walks by their section in the Covelli Centre. Some of the rally attendees stand as the man smiles and waves at them, applauding him before he climbs the steps to the press risers.
Surprisingly, the man at the center of this praise is not Donald Trump, even though the former US president is the host of the rally in the hardscrabble rust belt city of Youngstown, Ohio.
Instead, the object of the crowd’s adoration is Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and one of the most devoted promoters of the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election through widespread fraud.
Lindell has become a target of scorn and mockery among Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and even late-night hosts, but he has found a home at the rallies where the former president’s diehard fans gather to lament that Joe Biden illegally resides in the White House. While Lindell still makes a living off selling foam pillows (not to mention sheet sets, slippers and pet beds), he has now dedicated tens of millions of dollars to exposing the supposedly massive electoral fraud that he cannot prove.
Lindell’s antics and his near-ubiquitous presence in ads on far-right platforms (“My patented fill adjusts to your exact individual needs,” Lindell crows in one pillow commercial) have made it easy for Trump’s critics to laugh him off. But Lindell’s powerful and growing influence with a certain contingent of US voters demonstrates how deeply election lies have taken root in the Republican party, a trend that could have disastrous consequences on America’s future elections.
“He’s systematically reducing trust in elections,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “You have to believe that elections are legitimate in order for democracy to maintain its legitimacy. And so even when election results are questioned based on falsehoods and things that have been proven false over and over again, that lingering suspicion or belief that there’s something illegitimate threatens the whole system.”
From political novice to ‘big lie’ messenger
In 2009, the idea that Mike Lindell would become a well-known political personality would have shocked many people – including Mike Lindell.
A recovering crack cocaine addict, Lindell says he got sober in January 2009 and decided to rededicate his life to Christianity and his business, MyPillow, which he launched after having a dream about creating the perfect pillow. In 2011, Lindell started producing the infomercials that have become his trademark, and MyPillow soon began to grow rapidly. According to Lindell, more than 50m MyPillows have now been sold, and his Minnesota-based company employs about 2,000 people.
Before Trump launched his first presidential campaign, Lindell was a self-described political novice who could not clearly distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. “I had to learn what a liberal was, what a conservative was. I didn’t know anything about politics,” Lindell told CNN in 2018. “I was an addict, I was a crackhead. I didn’t get into politics, and I didn’t realize how important they were.”
That changed when Trump came down a golden escalator in the summer of 2015. Lindell has said he first met the then-presidential candidate in 2016, when Trump invited him to New York to talk about his business operations. After Trump won election, Lindell made multiple appearances at the White House, participating in a manufacturers’ summit and one of the first coronavirus briefings.
Taking on the role of campaign surrogate first in the 2018 midterms and later in the 2020 election, Lindell became a regular fixture of Trump’s rallies, offering increasingly outlandish compliments about the president. Speaking at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, Lindell declared that Trump had been “chosen by God” to lead the nation.
“They’re all soldiers in this fight, and it’s a holy war,” said Reed Galen, co-founder of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project. “They wrap all of this in religiosity … It’s not only like, ‘I’m fighting for freedom,’ but ‘I’m fighting for freedom literally under the banner of heaven.’”
For someone like Lindell, whose praise of Trump bordered on idolatry, the then-president’s loss in the 2020 election was not only devastating but unthinkable. Even after Trump’s legal team lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results and produced no valid evidence of widespread fraud, Lindell has continued to cling to the belief that the election was rigged. For Trump loyalists, Lindell offers a refuge from the reality that Biden won the popular vote by 7m.
“That explicitly comes up in these fraud narratives where they say, ‘It’s impossible that 80 million people voted for that guy, because he’s so terrible.’ Well, 80 million people think that about your guy,” Vandewalker said. “There’s definitely that element to it of ‘I can’t believe that our country is so messed up as to vote for somebody that I wouldn’t vote for, so it must be fraud.’”
Lindell has capitalized on that disbelief. The pillow salesman has reinvented himself as a prophet spreading the gospel of the “big lie” – and his devotion to the cause has now entangled his business, his personal finances and his legal liabilities.
In the drive-thru of a Hardee’s
In January 2020, days before Trump was set to leave office, Lindell sparked alarm inside the White House and across the country when he was spotted entering the Oval Office carrying notes that included the phrase “martial law if necessary”. Of course, Lindell’s apparent suggestion to impose military rule on the country in response to Trump’s electoral defeat did not come to fruition, and Biden was sworn in as president days later.
The incident highlighted Lindell’s ongoing commitment to election denialism, even after the deadly January 6 insurrection. (Lindell has said he did not participate in the attack on the Capitol, although he has acknowledged attending the Trump rally at the Ellipse before the violence began. The House select committee investigating the insurrection has subpoenaed Lindell’s phone records.)
If anything, Lindell has doubled down on his election fraud claims in the nearly two years since Trump’s loss. Lindell says he has now spent $35m-$40m supporting Trump’s election lies, with some of that money going toward legal fees and the production of a movie about the alleged fraud. Lindell has also sunk funds into a new social media platform called “Frank Social” after his peddling of election misinformation got him booted from Twitter (twice).
Lindell went so far as to host a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota last year, where he promised to finally reveal computer data proving that Chinese operatives had hacked state election systems. He failed to turn over that data, and the cyber symposium became the subject of mocking internet memes, but the embarrassing debacle does not appear to have humbled him. As recently as this month, Lindell claimed he would soon produce evidence proving that Biden stole the 2020 election.
Lindell’s activism has damaged more than just his bank account and his reputation. He has blamed his “big lie” activism (or “cancel culture”, in his words) for lost business partnerships between MyPillow and retailers like Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond, although those companies attributed their decisions to poor sales. MyPillow lost $80m in sales after the company’s products were pulled from major chain stores, Lindell told CNBC late last year.
The much larger financial risk for Lindell lies in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against him and MyPillow. The supreme court ruled earlier this month that Dominion’s lawsuit, which argues that Lindell harmed the company’s reputation by spreading false claims about its voting machines, could move forward. Meanwhile, a judge dismissed Lindell’s own lawsuits against Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting systems company, because of his “frivolous” and “groundless” claims.
Lindell’s work has even attracted the interest of federal investigators. As Lindell told the viewers of his online TV show last month, FBI agents served him with a search warrant as he waited in the drive-thru section of a fast-food restaurant, Hardee’s. Lindell said the agents seized his phone and asked him questions about Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk and “big lie” advocate who is facing charges for allegedly helping to facilitate a security breach of her local election system.
Hardee’s capitalized on the incident with a joke at Lindell’s expense. “Now that you know we exist,” the fast-food chain said in a tweet, “you should really try our pillowy biscuits.”
‘On the border of seditious’
Because of his lampooned symposiums and drive-thru altercations with federal agents, Lindell has become a somewhat easy target for jokes from those who have already rejected Trump’s election lies. But for those who refuse to believe Biden fairly won the 2020 election, Lindell’s financial and legal losses have only heightened his credibility.
At Trump’s rally in Youngstown last month, which took place just days after the Hardee’s dust-up, attendees formed a line in an aisle to get photos with Lindell and have him sign their “Make America great again” hats. One woman told Lindell “I love you” after taking a selfie with him, and another said she considered Lindell’s political work and life story to be “inspirational”.
“I like the fact that he’s funding the things he believes in,” Angela Phelps said after taking a photo with Lindell. “His behavior aligns with the words that come out of his mouth, and I like that.”
The hero worship of Lindell reflects how election denialism has become central to the Republican party’s identity, said Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History.
“He’s part of the lineup of superheroes who’ve stood and battled with Donald Trump,” Jacobs said. “His political judgment has been on the border of seditious, and yet he’s now risen to this kind of political cult status because of his support for Trump and his election-denying lies.”
Surveys reflect how expressing skepticism about the 2020 election results has become de rigueur for the Republican base. A Monmouth University poll taken last month found that 61% of Republicans – and 29% of all Americans – believe Biden only won the election because of voter fraud.
Those views have bled into the 2022 midterm elections, which are now just two weeks away. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 370 Republican candidates running for the US House and Senate and the state offices of governor, secretary of state and attorney general have questioned the 2020 results.
“The political paradigm that I grew up with is certainly gone,” said Galen, a former Republican operative. “This is the party now.”
In some ways, figures like Lindell give voters free license to wrap themselves in the fiction that Trump won the 2020 race. Experts warn the ongoing promotion of the “big lie” could make it even easier to undermine the results of future elections.
“The election denying has gone from a lie by Donald Trump after the 2020 election to a political epidemic that has swept the Republican party,” Jacobs said. “That is an extraordinary development that we’ve got one of the major political parties in America who has built its agenda around questioning the legitimacy of the peaceful transfer of power based on winning and losing elections … The trouble we have now is going to be accelerated in the future. It’s bad, and it’s going to get much worse.”
